STATEMENT:

In making art, I employ my body, primarily, as the focal point—a stage—and at different times add the use of sound, video, movement and commonplace found objects to create narratives. My performance pieces incorporate the themes that are integral to my work, and include sex, violence, ethnic identity and the onerous challenge of navigating gender norms and societal expectations. As an artist, I am empowered to appropriate and thus take control of the pervasive media images and cultural messages that assault the senses and drive us to covet that which undermines our true potential. 

BIO:

Leah Aron is a performance artist living in New York City. She has a BFA from Tisch School of the Arts, NYU, where she studied at the Experimental Theatre Wing, and worked with Karen Finley on independent projects. She has logged many hours in the loving drunken arms of the New York neo-burlesque scene, performing as her alter ego Amber Alert. Past works include: Hotsy Totsy Burlesque (NY Int’l Fringe Festival), Day Job: American Peril, (Chashama 37th St.), screening of Real Naturals, (ApexArt), Like, a Virgin (English Kills Art Gallery), SMS (English Kills Art Gallery).

WEBSITE: 

AMBER ALERT ON MYSPACE

STATEMENT:

I met a minotaur ten years ago.

My sister taught me that you can make your body a hole, and remarkably, repair it again. My teacher showed me that great art can be unremarkable in its materials or its gesture.
My dad lives in the desert inventing imaginary non-profits in his underwear, yelling at my mom for giving him less spaghetti sauce than he deserves.

America ate my dad and my sister. Or they ate it and shit it out. Or it shit them out. That's why I make art. To eat it. Let it eat me. Shit myself out. To make the minotaur's American art. Let it shit me out.

I create situations and gestures that reduce our mythology in order to emancipate it. Divergent and contrary layers of the story always emerge.

BIO:

Rob Andrews is an artist and teacher that lives in Brooklyn, NY.

WEBSITE:

ROB ANDREWS ON ARTISTS SPACE  

STATEMENT:

WEBSITE:

ELAINE ANGELOPOULOS ON ARTISTS SPACE

STATEMENT:

My work is an investigation of emotional excess and absence. I create movement installations composed of domestic situations, actions, and objects. With these components I make alternate living environments within a gallery or performance space. Live performers inhabit these environments and use a common language of movement to communicate with objects and with each other.

Improvisation is my primary tool for composition. This allows for a close collaboration with my performers—they bring their emotional selves and personal perspectives to the environments we create. My work is always evolving and shifting, since it exists not in objects but in the bodies of individuals.

BIO:

Lydia Bell is an artist and dancer based in New York. She grew up in Portland, Oregon and graduated from Wesleyan University in 2007. 

WEBSITE:

LYDIABELL.WORDPRESS.COM

BIO:

Matthew Blair lives and works in New York and advocates a difficult re-examination of context known as Post-Art. He has shown work and performed internationally.  He is co-founder of Samizdat and the Sanctuary of Hope in Ridgewood, Queens.  

WEBSITE:

 WWW.SAVESAMIZDAT.COM
WWW.CHRISTIANCENTERSANCTUARYOFHOPE.COM

 BIO:

 Ryan Brown grew up in Bucks County, PA, and after high school began studying Communication Design at Kutztown University. Having found no satisfactory outlet for his creative impulses in this field, he soon switched his focus to Fine Arts at Bucks County Community College where he received his Associates degree and a scholarship to the School of Visual Arts in New York. After graduating from SVA in 2006 he was invited to participate in the European Exchange Academy in Beelitz Germany where he continued to explore performance art and relational aesthetics. Over the last year Ryan has been a contributing member of the Analog Alliance, a cooperative enterprise whose mission is to provide experimental environments of unique social exchange through shared performance-based tasks. Ryan is an active participant in this years Peekskill Project, a community based art event happening in Peekskill, NY September 13-15th. 

WEBSITE:

Analog Alliance

BIO:

Ian Campbell has been involved with several facets of community projects and activism, addressing such issues as the affects of globalization and the American prison system.

STATEMENT:

BIO:

WEBSITE:

WWW.ALEXCHECHILE.COM

STATEMENT:

For years I worked as an artists model, a fully exposed yet anonymous presence. Through related performances, installations, and prints I inhabit the boundary between visibility and invisibility, motion and stillness, immersion and isolation. In the play between absence and presence, the body's "trace" and replication, there is a constant struggle between the desire to be autonomous and the desire to merge. Collapsing the spaces between figure and ground, reality and illusion, body art and figuration, I aim not to deny dualities, but explore the subtle fabric that shifts between them.

    My own body acts as artist, model, and medium. I print with hair cuttings and rubber castings made from parts of my body onto paper and my own skin. Entire spaces are created from a small fragment: entered, reflected upon, transformed. I wish to defy or redefine the limitations of my corporeal body, to have a dialogue with my own image, one that expresses the anxieties and pleasures of the contemporary body. I seek the place where the simulated, the metaphorical, and the corporeal body converge.

BIO:

Andrea Cote (formerly Andrea Gordon) is a multi-disciplinary visual artist and dancer living in New York. She has exhibited her work both nationally and internationally at venues including Islip Art Museum, Rotunda Gallery, Delaware Art Museum, Abrons Arts Center, Jack the Pelican Gallery, The Rochester Contemporary, Maryland Art Place, Art Center South Florida, The Print Center, The Moore Gallery, and 911 Media Arts Center. Her performances have been presented at The Philadelphia Fringe Festival, The Neuberger Museum, Chashama, Scope Art Fairs, The Dumbo Arts Festival, and Photo Buenos Aires . Her work has been reviewed in The New York Times, The Miami Herald, The New Times, Newsday, Artinfo.com, and Wynwood Art Magazine. Andrea received a video residency from the BCAT/ Rotunda Gallery and a Fellowship from the Center For Emerging Artists. She is represented by PanAmerican Art Projects in Miami, Florida.

In her work Andrea questions the boundaries that have traditionally divided artistic disciplines, taking on multiple roles using her own body as subject, object, and medium. For many years she worked as an artists' model. These experiences informed her current work, in which she mediates the space between the world inside an artwork and the one our bodies inhabit. Her work draws from the legacies of feminist, performance, and abstract expressionist art, as well as the history of figuration.

In addition to her studio practice, Andrea is committed to maintaining a dialogue with the community through writing, speaking, curating, and teaching. She co-curated the exhibition "Posing" with Joelle Jensen at the Abrons Art CenterEugene Lang College, The New School,"Sculpture and the Body" at the University of Washington Experimental College, "Interdisciplinary Collaboration" at SUNY Purchase, and "Mideastern Dance" at the Jamaica Center for Arts and Learning. She has taught as a visiting artist in the New York City public schools with The Dreamyard Project and The Brooklyn Arts Council.

WEBSITE:

WWW.ANDREASPACE.NET

STATEMENT:

My work focuses on the body in actions. In these actions, mental and physical planes of existence are created, establishing autonomy in endurance, physical movement, and structure. With my body, I alter and construct my vessel of experience, intrinsically connecting and emptying myself to a singular moment and time. Within these moments, I can then seek to communicate, focusing on energy exchanged between the audience and myself.

My practice is two-fold; live public actions performed for an audience and private actions performed for the camera. Both practices operate in complimentary forces, with actions relating in physical, structural, and conceptual intensity. I consider the video documentations of my work as important as the live performances of my work.

BIO:

Born in New Zealand, Dobill is a Brooklyn, NY based actionist who has performed across the country. Incorporating physical endurance within his work, the focus is on the body in actions, seeking communication within physical and mental limits.

WEBSITE:

WWW.PETERDOBILLACTIONIST.COM

STATEMENT:

For the past six years we have been collaborating on performances that focus on movement as a language of basic human interaction. These works serve as non-linear autobiographical documents.  The collection and comparison of our shared and unshared personal experiences are translated and re-assessed through the use of multiple videos, chance improvisation, sound, and the choreography of the breakdown of time.  
We are constantly reframing ourselves and our perceptions through timed site-specific movement exercises on camera.  The recorded results link the human experience and the event of performance, serving both as filtered documents and as actual video components placed within the live works.

We’d like to share our epiphanies, moments of hopelessness, debauchery, victories, whirlwinds of energy, and secret exchanges through these intimate spectacles.   The performances are a celebration and a reminder of everything that can happen all at once.  We seek to bring humanness and the body to the public in its most shimmering form, whether it is through a triumphant sensory experience or a grotesque yet celebrated vision of reality.

BIO:

Holly Faurot and Sarah H. Paulson live and work in Brooklyn, NY.  They received their BFAs in Sculpture and Selected Studies in Art (respectively) from Syracuse University in 2002. Faurot and Paulson’s  performances have been presented in galleries/venues including NYCAMS (New York Center for Art and Media Studies), NY; Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, NY; NURTUREart, Brooklyn, NY; The Chocolate Factory Theater, L.I.C. NY; P.I.T. (Projects In Transit), Brooklyn, NY; and Spark Contemporary Art Space, Syracuse, NY, among others, and their video work has been exhibited internationally.  They are recipients of the MAD (Harold Clurman Center for New Work in Movement and Dance Theater) Artist in Residence Space Grant and will present their new work at the Stella Adler Studio of Acting in September 2008. 

WEBSITE:

WWW.FAUROTPAULSON.COM 

STATEMENT:

XIMENA GARNICA:

Garnica LEIMAY explores the arts that work with and through time: dance, theater, performance, installation, improvisation, and life.  We wish to approach our work and life as forms of time: ephemeral, present, historical, immaterial, fluctuating, and interlaced together.  LEIMAY attempts to nurture and experiment in the arenas of dance, inter-media collaborations, and solo creations; extending the established borders for each medium, interweaving disciplines, and giving rise to new forms of art/performance.

Awakening consciousness by exploring the unconscious domain, allows us - as dancers, choreographers and theater artists - to expand our understanding of the body, and our experience and understanding of daily life, in order to enlarge the realms of perception, creation, and consequently the possibilities for interaction therein.  LEIMAY perceives the process of conceptualizing, forming and experiencing a dance piece, as an act of transformation of the surrounding reality and an opportunity to transform ourselves.

The human body is at the root of our creative work.  LEIMAY’s work is focused on the “total body” and its presence, synthesized through voice, body and a performance experience, grounded through the senses to discover/uncover the ambivalence of human nature.

“Dance is vertigo, the instant of letting go in order to rediscover, endlessly, the truth of being. Dance is a constant transformation and revolution, unique to each being.  Each human finds one’s own dance, body, and rhythm.  Dance is a way of life, realization of existence in the motion that appears in stillness.  Dance is a realization of existence, in the stillness visible in the chaos of movement.  Dance is born and dies with each of us.”

SHIGE MORIYA:

Light and darkness give me the possibility to think about beginnings and endings. To create my work is to look for my place. When I see beginnings and endings in my work, I feel I exist. Art is the power of revolution, a way of direct communication without the distance and lightness of knowledge.  Placing the opposing processes of fermentation and of settling together is my primary goal.

Beginnings and endings are compounded and continued in reality.  In other words, what appears to be a beginning or an ending is really a limited way of perceiving what more closely resembles an interconnected web of activity.

When I stand out in a vast natural landscape, I realize that I am so small by comparison.  I am in awe of the overwhelming life force of Nature.  I can't discover even one appropriate word when I am engulfed by that kind of voluminous energy.  Yet I respect it so much.  When I create something, I always wonder if I can express even a trace of that depth. At the same time, I think that this kind of expression, which is possible through art, is better than language for a certain kind of communication.

BIO:

XIMENA GARNICA 

Ximena Garnica - is a dancer-actress, emerging choreographer, director, and installation artist based in NYC: Artistic director of Garnica LEIMAY, director of the NY Butoh Festival, as well as co-director of CAVE Organization, an experimental art space in  Brooklyn. Recipient of the prestigious Van Lier Fellowship for young Hispanic directors in NY; Ms. Garnica has received support from: The Urban Artist Initiative (UAI/NYC), Robert Wilson's Watermill Center, and the Japan Foundation.

SHIGE MORIYA 

Shige Moriya, works as an installation and video  artist, creating large, translucent structures, constructed with filmy sculptures of transparent fabric.. His work has been presented in Japan, Finland, Vietnam, Germany and the US He has been Curator of CAVE gallery for the last ten years; much of this time, his work has been devoted to supporting/presenting the work of emerging visual/multi-disciplinary artists. Moriya is co-director of CAVE, co-curator of the NY Butoh Festival and core member of Garnica LEIMAY and CaveEnsemble.    

WEBSITE:

WWW.CAVEARTSPACE.ORG

WWW.LEIMAYACTSLAB.ORG

BIO:

Andrew Hurst is a mixed media artist who has exhibited his work nationally and internationally for over a decade.  Hurst has performed in many of NYC's top venues including Issue Project Room, Abrons Art Center, Downtown Music Gallery and Collective Unconscious, among others.  In 2006, Hurst was commissioned by Saatchi & Saatchi to compose music for The Award for World Changing Ideas, culminating in the CD "Eleven."  He is currently at work on his 7th solo recording due in Oct. 08.  His poster graphics and collage work will be on view @ Roebling Hall as part of the exhibition "All Cut Up"  which opens Sep. 4th-- thru  Oct. 4.  He lives and works in Brooklyn with cameras, glue,tape recorders and his tarantula Becky. 

WEBSITE:

ANDREW HURST ON MYSPACE 

BIO:

Naoki Iwakawa was born in Osaka, Japan. He moved to the States in 1991. In 1996, he became an artist-in-residence at CAVE. Together with Artist Curator Shige Moriya, Mr. Iwakawa helped to established CAVE. He currently lives in New York and still have his studio at CAVE. His work has been shown at OK Harris gallery, Art Gotham, 450 Broadway Gallery and Cast Iron gallery,  in NYC.

WEBSITE:

WWW.CAVEARTSPACE.ORG 

STATEMENT:

I construct a participatory scenario that allows for voluntary artful interplay, interaction, communication, and coexistence. In this case, the scenario serves as a present experience and an abstract metaphor. For example: rolling a ball back and forth in a gallery is an actual experience of play, as well as a metaphor for a relationship’s communication. The meaning, actions, objects and people are interconnected. They are drawn from, overlap, and reunite with the everyday playing out or performance of life. I find it necessary to continually find new ways of arriving at a place we have been.  

BIO:

C. Amery Kessler is a multidisciplinary artist whose work resists categorization while acknowledging convention. His practice employs concepts of solitude, harmony, play, and social innovation. Kessler regularly builds upon a personal connection to athletics, music, construction trades, and pedagogy to form a scenario that is situated at the seam of spectacular and mundane existence and perception. 

STATEMENT:

It is extremely difficult, some would argue impossible, to communicate an authentic personal voice in today’s contemporary world where the endless simulacra of experience seems to engender a waning of all affect and real meaning. Faced with this contemporary issue, I am most concerned with the question of how one can have and convey a real experience. And furthermore, how do we know and hold onto what is real when our lives are constantly mediated, produced, or numbed by the power of the spectacle?

Through my Found Performances, I utilize the embodied performative event to express my real emotional experience in as authentic a way as possible for myself and the audience, attempting to somehow transcend pre-determined, primarily production-driven, social roles. While fully aware of the challenge and inherent contradictions in this endeavor, I determine to do it anyway, documenting both my successes and failures in this process as my art.

BIO:

Marni Kotak is a multimedia performance artist who lives and works in New York City. In her recent body of work, Found Performances, Kotak utilizes multimedia in live re-enactments of scenes from her life. The goal in these works is for Kotak to relive the emotional experiences in as real a way as possible, thereby achieving a transformative catharsis for herself and audience members who have likely gone through similar or related experiences.

Recent Found Performances include Third Grade, exhibited as part of the censored Plan B, 2006 Brooklyn College MFA Thesis exhibit, and Sandbox, Radiator, and Big Hair exhibited at Artists Space in conjunction with Performa ’05. The entire space of Found Performances is created as realistically as possible to point to the original setting in which the life event occurred, utilizing any media that is available and appropriate. Themes center around the deep knowledge shared by families, close friends and lovers, including emotional issues, abuse, family recipes, traditions and sentimental objects.

Kotak’s work has been featured in the Performing Arts Journal, the New York Times, the Village Voice, NY Arts, New York Press, Art New England, and more. In 2006, she was one of 18 graduating artists from Brooklyn College’s MFA program, whose thesis exhibition was shut down and censored by city officials, and who subsequently filed suit in federal court for First Amendment violations. She now lives and has her studio in Bushwick, Brooklyn, with her white pet rat Daisy.

WEBSITE:

MARNIKOTAK.COM 

STATEMENT:

My work is based on my own experiences of speaking English as a second language.

I combine text, video and performance to discuss how we use language to negotiate, appropriate and interpret different cultures.  I am really interested in the elements that spoken words hold such as accents, durations, emotions, hesitations and mistakes -- things that are not easily translated into written forms.  I often use dubbing, subtitles and I also juxtapose spoken text and written text to explore the notion of “perfect” speech, the faithfulness of voice to the image, and the ownership of language.

BIO:

Sujin Lee pronounces her last name “Yi” when she is home. She writes her first name as one word in English without a hyphen or a space, meaning it should be “Sujin,” not “Su-jin” or “Su Jin.” It’s quite simple, really.

WEBSITE:

WWW.SUJINLEE.ORG 

STATEMENT:

      The feminist movement can not obliterate the real and perceived fetters of sex.  As a woman, I am linked to the long-established role of caretaker and sexual-object.  This defines me both culturally and biologically.  It’s a hard pill for a modern feminine artist to swallow.

      As the only daughter from a traditional Christian household of five I struggle to accept my distinct role and find peace in the gender expectations that accompany my sex. These notions of femininity have been unintentionally forced upon me by my father, brothers, mother, friends, teachers and the mass-media.  By closely examining both my shame and strength within the context of art, I am attempting to overcome at least in my own mind - the negative connotations female biology and feminist tradition are frequently associated with.


Mom in Me - Me in Mom

No one else exists in my deep

   Rosy,

    Dark,

     Tight,

      Muffled, quiet.

Warm walls embrace,

Softly waving

With tidal love, pain and expectation. 

BIO:

Evelyn Lewis is a recent Pratt graduate and after living in seven cities across the country including Bayamón PR, Las Vegas NV, and Ithaca NY, currently resides in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn, NY. She is a multi-disciplined artist who incorporates her own body, found and fabricated objects, light, sound, installation and video into cohesive compositions that focus primarily on societal, feminist function through her own experiences.  

WEBSITE:

EVELYN LEWIS ON ARTISTS SPACE

STATEMENT:

Sound is a vital element in my work, as a person who lost my hearing as a victim of a violent crime and regained it through surgery.  Sound as an expression is paramount in my work.  I pull and dip from any medium necessary to express my feelings and topics.  In my performance work I use sound, my body, found objects and memory as a transformative avenue. Music and recorded texts play along in the creative and intellectual process. My work is based in freedom of expression and strives to be an example of how art in any medium can be used to transform life experience.

BIO:

Melissa Lockwood is an inter-media artist working in Sound, Video, Performance, Painting and Collage.  She works Solo and Collaboratively. She has shown and Performed Internationally. Her works are physical and visceral going to the core of emotions relating to violence/anti violence.

WEBSITE:

MELISSA LOCKWOOD ARTIST PORTFOLIO 

STATEMENT:

I like to be in a tableau, not just a spectator standing in front to contemplate the image.

In my favorite work, I create an installation, an environment, within which I make a performance. Then, I lead the audience from one environment to another, making performances in each space, which create a full story at the end.

My performances are always autobiographical, but not in an obvious sense. They are stories that unfold from my emotions, in a way that I hope other people can respond to.

Lately, I have been performing outside of the United States, and I will occasionally create a performance that is political. The reaction, again and again, is that the audience is surprised to see an American making such political statements, but not only that – a woman making political work.

My work ranges from simple : peeling an apple with an onion hidden inside as a metaphor for my life, seeing my experiences in my mind in reverse as I peel to the core – and elaborate : installations that use many media, from Super 8 film to video projections, sound affects and smells.

For me, the audience is always an integral part of the piece. I like to communicate with them, I never pretend they are not there, and I am gentle with them as I bring them into my world, even just for a little while.

I should also mention that have been running a gallery for Performance Art in Brooklyn, the Grace Exhibition Space, with Melissa Lockwood, since August, 2006. We have hosted artists from around the world, artists from New York City and from the public schools in Bushwick.

Bringing Performance Art to the city has been a vital goal for years. Performance Art is my passion, it’s my obsession and it’s my life.

Best,

Jill

BIO:

Born May 12, 1966 New York City, USA, Jill has an MFA in Intermedia and Video Art from the University of Iowa, and currently lives in New York City.

WEBSITE:

WWW.GRACEEXHIBTIONSPACE.MULTIPLY.COM

STATEMENT:

EMCEE C.M., MASTER OF NONE

We are many, and Emcee C.M. is one of us. The work we do combines large-scale public, social and collaborative event-based projects with a more internal process of self-reflection through fiction, storytelling, and filmmaking. Last year a couple of us built a sauna and coordinated a series of events around it. Elsewhere, a bunch of us got together and activated a public space with a set of homemade musical instruments, a miniature library, a small garden, a wall for writing, and a shed for displaying small personal objects. The year before that we got about 100 people together and built a wooden boat in three weeks, using it for several public actions relating to local waterways.

The work we do always concerns us, all of us, we people. We are alive, working and playing. We have our personal and our general struggles. We are trying to understand the anxieties that freeze us in place, and celebrate our power to overcome them. If our work is how we define ourselves, then our life is work, our work is life, and it is our life’s work. Work describes what all of us do with our time when we are actively engaged in living. It is the basic activity. This is the starting point: whatever else gets incorporated into a specific project, our work is always about work.

HUONG NGO

I am concerned with intimacy and distance. I seek to find that space where one can be vulnerable, show scars, connect, and heal from the shock of difference. Thus, in my worlds, displaced characters occupy threatening landscapes both urban and natural. They are dystopian environments where uncomfortable social situations are allowed to burgeon in the effort to reveal new questions and unspoken truths. Their efforts towards self-preservation, nourishment, and communication take the forms of creative acts, new systems of exchange, and sometimes even displays of disturbing psychological realities. Heavily based in play, exploration of the self, and improvisation of non-professional performers, my performances and constructed spaces open up corners for temporary communities to develop. Acting together, we have the power to resist and reverse the dehumanizing effects of modernization. 

BIO:

EMCEE C.M., MASTER OF NONE

Born in Coventry, Connecticut, U.S.A., in 1979. Grew up in a family of six boys. Played in bands with friends. Studied Linguistics, Russian and Studio Arts at Brandeis University. Worked at a small Siberian village trade college for a year. Got an MFA at the University of Connecticut in 2005. Worked on a goat farm making cheese for a while. Moved to New York and started doing odd jobs. Through all this developed a life practice involving active, public works utilizing books, music, film, events, play and conversation. 

HUONG NGO

Huong Ngo is an artist born in Hong Kong and working between Brooklyn and Chicago. 

WEBSITE:

WWW.EMCEECM.COM

WWW.HUONGNGO.COM

STATEMENT:

I work within limitations such as reverse movement and inescapable cycles, often utilizing repetitive movement, to reach a gestural dreamstate. I allow for improvised action once there is recognition of the true performative impulse. I incorporate live and recorded sound. I frequently perform with live animals. 

BIO:

Marissa Mickelberg is a performative movement artist, director and choreographer. She lives in New York City. Marissa's work has been seen at Supreme Trading, The American Mime Theatre, Bushwick Open Studios 2007 and 2008, The Last Supper, The Bushwick Starr, street clowning in Bedford Circus of Fools, as various mascots in the NYC area, with mime troupe Tip Toe Crash, at Lumenhouse and Starr Street Space in Bushwick, Don Pedro in Williamsburg, at Division of Human Works, The Sanctuary of Hope, and English Kills Art Gallery for their Grand Opening and Wood shows.

WEBSITE:

MARISSA MICKELBERG ON MYSPACE

BIO:

JEREMY D. SLATER is a sound artist essentially, but also works with video and sound in performance and installation settings.

He uses his laptop computer to create a variety of sound, image, and interactive work. Jeremy was one of the 1999 recipients of the Computer Art Fellowship from New York Foundation of the Arts (NYFA) and has exhibited and performed nationally and internationally.

WEBSITE:

WWW.JEREMYSLATER.NET

STATEMENT:

 The Performances in this series are endurance projects intended to clearly define situations in which, to different degrees, we all engage in.

      I feel that as a culture we are so inundated by how efficiently we produce and how much we consume that we rarely able to follow our personal thoughts and feelings.  We work to live, and live to work.  None of us like to admit our role in propagating this culture of consumption, I know I don’t, but recognizing that we actually have to devise strategies to disconnect from it allows us to begin to question if we really identify with the uniforms we routinely wear and the acquisitions we have made, or if identity, culture and existence nurtured by the things we cannot define.

BIO:

Mark Stafford was born in Anchorage, Alaska in 1978.  He received his BFA from the University of Arizona (2002), an MFA from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (2005), and an AIM fellow of the Bronx Museum of the Arts (2008). His work has been exhibited internationally and has been exhibited at venues such as Exit Art, NY; Black and White Gallery, NY; The Institute of Contemporary Art, PA; and the 7th wierkliets Biennal in Germany, The Museum of the National Library of Spain, and is regularly contributed to Trickster Theatre Company. He currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY and is an adjunct faculty member of both Pratt and School of Visual Arts.

WEBSITE:

WWW.MARKLAWRENCESTAFFORD.COM

STATEMENT:

Life is a violent gesture against death.
It is not a positive movement but one of gravity and grace.
I am compelled to destroy as much as I create. 

BIO:

Lech Szporer lives and works in New York. He is Co-founder of Samizdat and the Sanctuary of Hope in Ridgewood, Queens. His work often addresses the coercion of demarcations and the accursed share of post-art.

WEBSITE:

WWW.SAVESAMIZDAT.COM

WWW.CHRISTIANCENTERSANCTUARYOFHOPE.COM

STATEMENT:

My performance-based work is always a reaction to my environment, mostly my political or social environments.  Most of my performances in the past have involved me blending into my cultural surroundings.  Forcing the viewers to question the legitimacy of my actions and in turn questioning their own actions.    

BIO:

Matthew White is a Brooklyn based artist who was born in 1978.  He grew up in Las Vegas, NV where he continued his education at the University of Nevada Las Vegas, receiving his BFA in 2005. Matthew received his MFA from the School of Visual Arts in New York in 2008.  Matthew works in many mediums including sculpture, performance, video, and installations.  His work has been shown in galleries such as Exit Art (NY), English Kills (NY), The Winchester Gallery (LV), Jennifer Marie Gallery (LV), and in the Conflux Festival (NY). 

WEBSITE:

MATT WHITE ON ARTISTS SPACE

BIO:

Tamara Yadao is a multimedia performance artist who uses audiovisual technology to address notions of representation.  She abstracts recorded expressions of the body to investigate formal relationships between movement and electronic media.  Pieces are purposed for the single channel, multi-channel performance installation and live performance.  Among others, her work has been screened/performed at the Brooklyn Museum, Dixon Place, the Kitchen, Knitting Factory NY and Symphony Space. 

STATEMENT:

Alan Kaprow once stated that performance is active everywhere: "in stomachs, or freeways, in compost heaps, through fax machines, or at the work place." It has no definite beginning or end – "the line between art and life should be kept as fluid, and perhaps indistinct, as possible."

There is no boundary between performer and audience. There is no such thing as a solo performance. The "fourth wall" does not exist. Performance is happening everywhere all the time, whether one acknowledges it or not. My performance is the audience's performance - they are the stars.

BIO:

Jen Zakrzewski was born in Abington, Massachusetts in 1984. In spring of 2007 she received her BFA in Studio Art from NYU. While in New York she has worked with a number of artists including Brock Enright (720, 2003, and Forest, 2005), Ron Athey(Untitled Project, 2006) and was instrumental in bringing Vaginal Davis' 1920s-themed club Bricktops to the city (Bricktops Takes Manhattan, 2006). She has shown work at Cynthia Broan Gallery (NYC), English Kills Art Gallery (Brooklyn), South Shore Arts Center (MA), Wallspace Gallery (NYC), and The Corcoran Gallery (Washington D.C.), among others. She has done numerous performance projects including the Placebo Effect outside of New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art and Videogames Adventure Services. She is currently the resident photographer at Shien Lee's 1920s-themed club Dances of Vice, collaborating with artist Kristen Rhea van Liew on an assortment of performances, and is working with various artists, dancers and filmmakers with projects utilizing her special effects makeup talent. Jen lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. 

WEBSITE:

JENZAK.COM